It's not brand vs. growth
How to use your brand to drive growth
👋 Hi, it’s Kyle Poyar and welcome to Growth Unhinged, my weekly newsletter exploring the hidden playbooks behind the fastest-growing startups.
My next guest is someone I’ve been excited to collaborate with for a while. Kira Klaas was the first marketer at Brex where she led Brex’s 2020 rebrand. She then headed up integrated marketing and brand at Notion — which won big for its first global brand campaign, “For your life’s work.” And now Kira is here to finally dispel a myth tormenting marketers everywhere: brand vs. growth.
You can go deeper with Kira’s top-rated Maven course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders (Kira’s offering $100 off for Growth Unhinged subscribers). And don’t miss her Substack — it’s (literally) On Brand.
Favorite Maven courses | My Future of GTM series | The GTM10 awards
Search any influential article on product-market fit. The word "brand" rarely appears. This blind spot is costing companies millions in missed growth opportunities—and I've watched it happen firsthand.
When I tell growth leaders that their viral coefficients and negative CAC are actually brand metrics, they sometimes look at me like I'm crazy. But after leading brand at Notion and Brex, I've learned something that might be counterintuitive: The most successful companies don't treat brand as separate from growth, or something they'll "do" later—they use it as their growth multiplier from day one.
To build a massive company, you already know you have to win on both product AND go-to-market. But go-to-market is just one piece of brand-market fit—the concept I wish someone had taught me before I spent years figuring it out the hard way.
I define brand-market fit (BMF) as: the degree to which a company's identity, values, and overall customer experience resonate with and meet the emotional and aspirational needs of its target market. It complements product-market fit by ensuring that not only does the product solve the right problem, but the brand itself creates a meaningful connection with customers.
While product-market fit gets you in the game, brand-market fit helps you win it.
This is especially applicable for growth and product leaders obsessed with scaling their PLG motions. Brand has unfortunately (and unfairly) earned a reputation for being "fuzzy," hard to measure, or a nice-to-have—basically the opposite of the highly-structured, metrics-driven approach that defines PLG success. This oversimplification has done founders and their teams a huge disservice.
When you have both product-market fit and brand-market fit, you're unstoppable. That's what the companies who beat their inevitable PLG growth ceilings have figured out: "brand" isn't some vague, mysterious force that defies measurement. It's a strategic asset that directly powers your growth engine—before you hit those ceilings.
If you're a growth leader, you're probably already tracking several brand metrics without realizing it. The organic traffic you're so proud of, the viral coefficients you optimize for, the word-of-mouth that drives your negative CAC: All of these are signals of good brand health.
Below, I'll break down exactly how brand drives growth, share a framework for measuring brand's impact on key metrics, and provide tactical guidance on balancing investment across different growth stages.
The growth/brand connection
When we talk about product-led growth, we're usually focused on how product features and user experience drive adoption. But here's what's actually happening: Your product delivers an experience, that experience shapes perceptions, and those perceptions become your brand—whether you're actively shaping them or not. Let’s look at how this plays out in real success stories:
Notion
Notion's growth over the past few years has been powered by users who proudly shared their workspaces because being a "Notion person" became part of their identity. They have one of the strongest user communities in SaaS with over 1 million members actively sharing templates and workflows. They’re advocates because Notion reflects how they want to be perceived: organized, creative, and productivity-minded. Notion’s branded search traffic is exceptionally high, especially when compared with how relatively little they’re spending on paid traffic (meaning high word-of-mouth and brand loyalty). Monday.com, meanwhile, has to pay to maintain visibility.
Figma
Figma has maintained a $12.5 billion valuation because they (and not Sketch, nor InVision) became wholly synonymous with modern, collaborative design. When designers use Figma, they're aligning themselves with a perceived set of best practices and an implied quality bar, a professionalism that Canva, for example, does not convey. Figma built a brand that stands for design democratization—making sophisticated design accessible to teams of all sizes. Again, that's brand driving PLG success.
Canva
Canva built a PLG engine that captured the massive market of non-designers who needed design tools. There have been dozens of cheaper, online Adobe alternatives throughout the years, and what accelerated Canva’s growth wasn’t just the simple interface for first-timers, but building a brand that stood for democratizing design. Their brand promise of "empowering the world to design" made users feel like they were part of a movement vs. just using a tool. The emotional connection users feel with Canva drives its viral growth and consistently high CSAT and NPS scores, so users introduce the tool to colleagues and friends.
The point is: Your brand isn't something you can separate from your product experience. Instead, your brand is the collection of all the elements that make that experience meaningful and shareable, that creates resonance with your target users, that creates loyalty and paves the way for expansion and upsell.
How to measure brand signals
You may be familiar with the traditional approach to brand tracking: large-scale consumer surveys that measure brand recognition, consideration, and sentiment through metrics like aided and unaided awareness (“Have you heard of this brand?”) and consideration (“How likely are you to purchase this brand?”) or purchase intent.
These tracking studies, which typically cost six figures annually and survey thousands of potential customers, are valuable for understanding broader market perceptions, especially when you operate in multiple regions. But a point-in-time look at awareness—usually measured once or twice a year—means you're looking at historical data that can be challenging to connect to current initiatives.
Instead, let's look more closely at how brand directly influences growth by mapping the relationship between brand signals and your key growth metrics:
Organic acquisition: Are people looking for you by name? How many people already know where to find you? What are people saying when you’re not in the room? Are you reaching new communities?
Time-to-value: Do brand-aware users convert better? Does brand familiarity reduce friction? How quickly do users trust your defaults? Do users who know your brand dive-in faster?
Expansion revenue: Do brand-aware users spend more? Who’s most likely to explore your full offering? How quickly do users trust you enough to invite others? Do brand-aware users see more value faster?
Word of mouth: Who are your best brand ambassadors? How often do users showcase their work? Is your product becoming part of users’ identity? Are users invested in your ecosystem?
Your first 90 days
If you’re ready to get serious about thinking about your brand, then here are a few tactical things you can do over one quarter to figure out how your brand might be influencing your growth right now.
After this, I’ll get into an even more tactical breakout by growth stage to guide what your resourcing and investments might look as you move from one phase into the next.
First 30 days:
Audit your touchpoints: In Figma, take screenshots of every place users encounter your brand or product, from Google search results to homepage to signup flow to onboarding or nurture emails to live product. Look for inconsistencies, funky user experiences and dead ends; missed opportunities to be more expressive about who you are, who you’re for, and what problems you can solve for your audience.
Pick your metrics: Choose 3-4 of the key brand health indicators detailed above that align with your growth goals. In Notion’s case, we tracked how quickly users went from single-player to multiplayer mode (sharing and collaboration). We found that users who came through brand channels like organic search or word-of-mouth converted to team usage significantly faster than those from paid acquisition.
Document what's working: What do your best customers already love? What stories do they tell about your product? These are your best clues into your authentic brand strengths, which you’ll want to double down on over time.
Next 30 days:
Start tracking your brand metrics: Set baselines for your chosen metrics.
Add your brand metrics to tracking dashboards, or build a simple sheet.
Layer in qualitative signals like social mentions, sentiment, and support conversations.
Bring in the product team: Look for opportunities to build stronger relationships between your Marketing and your Product teams, for visibility and collaboration (Product is creating brand experiences every day!)
Final 30 days:
Establish regular feedback loops between Brand, Product, and Growth teams—update docs, Slack channels, consider a few intentional meetings.
Start experimenting with small brand initiatives and measuring impact.
Set realistic quarterly goals for your brand metrics, like:
Increase branded search volume by 15% QoQ
Track brand channel CAC compared to other acquisition sources
Monitor retention rates by acquisition source to prove brand value
In this exercise, keep it manageable and useful by choosing metrics that:
You can actually influence in a quarter
Connect directly to your growth motion
Tell you something meaningful about brand health
And throughout, make sure you’re not walking into these mistakes:
Trying to measure everything at once—start small and expand
Keeping brand conversations among marketers only—Product and Support teams need to be involved
Delivering inconsistent messages across channels
Racing to enterprise positioning before your brand can support it
Not documenting what works and why
A crash course for where to invest first
From here, let's explore how to map brand investments to your company's growth stage. You don't need to do everything at once, but you do need to start earlier than you might think. And another caveat—the bullets below represent work that may unfold or develop over several months, and specifics of some of these potential projects or strategies will vary dramatically based on the context of your business and audience.
Your initial brand experiments won’t be billboards. You’re looking to make investments that act like compounding interest—they get more valuable over time, and the earlier you start, the better.
The first thing to focus on is to document your foundational story:
Who your product is truly for (be ruthlessly specific)?
What core problem you're solving?
How you uniquely solve it?
Why anyone should care?
This clarity doesn't come from late-night founder sessions—it comes from structured learning from your early users through bi-weekly interviews, support conversation tracking, and documenting organic sharing.
Then, build consistent product and marketing touchpoints:
Product UI copy and error messages
Onboarding flows
Help documentation
Email communications
Social presence
Sales and support conversations
And ensure you have basic brand measurement in place:
Time to activation for word-of-mouth vs. other channels
Referral patterns and viral loops
Social mentions and sentiment
Help documentation usage (signals where your product isn't intuitive)
Community engagement metrics
This doesn’t need to be a major resource investment. In my experience, look to spend about 5-10 hours per week in user conversations and documentation. You don’t need to make many financial investments at this point—mainly user research tools and basic design resources. And you don’t need a dedicated brand hire yet – this work is typically led by founders or early marketing hires.
As you’re achieving product-market fit and your product is catching on, your brand needs to do more heavy lifting as you shift from branding (a passive asset) to brand marketing (actively distributing your brand to drive demand). At this point, I usually recommend allocating 25-35% of marketing budgets to brand marketing, working toward the classic 60/40 split as you scale.
Practically, that might mean you:
Launch a user-generated content (UGC) program
Create a template gallery or resource center
Build an ambassador program
Start regular community events
When you reach PMF maturity, you’ll likely notice diminishing returns from performance channels, increasing competition for your keywords, and growing enterprise interest but longer sales cycles. This is when I recommend hiring a Head of Brand and really doubling down.
The TL;DR:
Brand isn't the opposite of growth—it's a growth multiplier. The most successful companies aren't choosing between brand and growth; they're using brand to accelerate their growth motion from day one.
Kira developed her four-week Maven course, Brand for Growth-Stage Leaders, to help marketing and product leaders turn brand into their ultimate growth multiplier. The course breaks down dozens of tactical approaches she’s used to drive alignment and scale brands at companies like Notion and Brex, with flexible, self-paced learning and 1:1 coaching. (Growth Unhinged readers save $100 with this link.)
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I'll take every opportunity to break down brand misconceptions and evangelize brand-market fit, but getting in front of Growth Unhinged readers is next level.
If you liked today's newsletter, @ me!! Love hearing how people are tackling this across all kinds of companies and industries. Thanks again for the collab, Kyle 🙌
This was so helpful! Very timely to what I’m trying to figure out at Plot (a small saas startup). Thank for breaking down that 90 day approach and how to measure.